When the dust settled in the Granite State this state, Donald Trump had collected a double-digit victory over Nikki Haley in the Republican primary, improving to two wins and no losses in the 2024 nominating process. Turnout hit an all-time high. Whether the win typified Trump's strength and inevitability -- or, conversely, raised red flags about his weakness -- is somewhat in the eye of the beholder. There's some truth to each narrative. Trump fans will point to consecutive, comfortable wins in the highly-anticipated 'first in the nation' states of Iowa and New Hampshire. In each place, Trump easily overcame a rival securing the endorsement and enthusiastic support of a popular sitting Republican governor. He did so despite spending significantly less time and effort campaigning on the ground (and less money) than his closest competitors. He appears to be coasting to the crown. On the other hand, in both cases, between 43 and 49 percent of participating voters signaled a desire for someone other than Trump to be the GOP nominee heading into the fall general election. This is an insightful point about the resulting political Rorschach test:
It’s funny how your evaluation of the GOP primary is entirely about what baseline you pick: if it’s the “open primary” baseline, Trump has put in the strongest performance…ever? If it’s the incumbent reelection baseline it’s the weakest since…1976?
— Matthew Zeitlin (@MattZeitlin) January 24, 2024
If you're evaluating this race as an open and competitive primary, Trump's performance is historically dominant. If you're evaluating it as if he's an incumbent -- which he sort of is, and has certainly acted like one in his strategic decisions thus far -- his showings have been decidedly underwhelming. The truth likely lies somewhere in between, given Trump's status as a quasi-incumbent, for lack of a better term. Here's what is clear to me: First, while this race may not be "over," as many Trump supporters insist it is, it's awfully close to being done. Unless Nikki Haley parlays her closer-than-expected (it looked less close as the night wore on) New Hampshire loss into a mammoth comeback in her home state, Trump is poised to improve to 3-0 in the first three major battles, not including the Nevada caucuses, in which he's running basically unopposed. The path for Haley, if it exists at all, is vanishingly thin. It's very, very likely that the nominee will be Trump. Whether Haley could be making a play for VP by sticking around and amassing delegates (and therefore leverage), as Kayleigh McEnany floated on Fox, remains to be seen. Second, as I noted in my post-call election night commentary, there are a lot of Republican and independent voters who remain reticent at best about the prospect of making Trump the party's standard-bearer again:
My analysis from New Hampshire: pic.twitter.com/pRGFTYt6NZ
— Guy Benson (@guypbenson) January 24, 2024
It's true that only about a quarter of registered Republicans in New Hampshire voted for Haley, while she won independents by nearly 25 percentage points. She also carried the (relatively few, but still significant) Democratic crossovers by a lopsided margin. Trump loyalists dismiss the Dems-for-Haley voters as interlopers meddling in the Republican process, who will end up back on Team Blue in the fall. There are surely some exceptions to that (Haley leads Biden in a number of blue-tinted battleground states in various recent polls), but let's just grant the argument. The same is probably true of some of the independents who notched votes for Haley on Tuesday, but there were certainly quite a few unaffiliated New Hampshire voters who genuinely prefer her over Trump, who is a fully known commodity at this stage. Republicans will need every independent vote they can muster in November. Haley performed well this week among college-educated, less partisan, and more moderate primary voters. These are precisely the sorts of voters who have moved away from the GOP in recent cycles, resulting in losses and under-performances across multiple election cycles. The party cannot ignore this problem, wish it away, or actively insult the people whose votes they will need.
Many Republican base voters are convinced that Trump has been given a raw deal and is the best candidate to beat Biden, who is so awful and enfeebled and incompetent that he could not possibly win in November. At the moment, Biden does indeed trail Trump in their likely rematch, and the former president is also performing comparatively well in key states (with some numbers starting to move in the opposite direction). Will that hold up for the next nine months -- as voters see more and more and more of Trump, doing Trump things, and popping in and out of various trials and legal hearings? What happens if one or more felony convictions arrive? What's the Republican game plan for that contingency? Democrats have their own doom scenarios and enthusiasm/turnout worries, of course, but in order to prevail, Trump will need to consolidate and unify virtually the entire GOP base, convince enough disaffected center-right voters to re-enter the fray, and perform better among independents than he did last time -- all while peeling off certain Democrats and cutting further into their margins among certain demographics.
I'm not arguing Trump can't win; he certainly might. But I think the notion that it will be an easy layup is dead wrong. He's very strong within Republican politics. He's a lot less strong among everyone else. The results in Iowa and New Hampshire offer warning signs that significant challenges lie ahead for Republicans in another election with Trump leading the ticket. That's a reality that should be taken seriously, as opposed to triggering a churlish and juvenile response to sound advice from a longtime and loyal ally:
Magnanimous in victory, focused on unity! Definitely not exhausting or needlessly alienating! https://t.co/uwlOJVgjJV
— Guy Benson (@guypbenson) January 24, 2024
I'll leave you with this, in reaction to a call to 'eradicate' non-Trump voters from the Republican Party:
Eradicating people from the party who don't completely agree with Trump is what you've *been doing,* particularly in the suburbs. That's why the big L in 2020 & others. "We shall eradicate ourselves to overwhelming victory!" is... not the way. https://t.co/CozC70mngZ
— Mary Katharine Ham (@mkhammer) January 24, 2024
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